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Why Moderates Should Like Paul Ryan

By Ross Douthat August 14, 2012 10:26 pmAugust 14, 2012 10:26 pm

Paul Ryan is not a moderate, not a centrist, and certainly not a perfectly neutral non-ideological number-crunching budget wonk. He is a conservative whose fiscal blueprints and budgets are drawn up with conservative goals uppermost in mind. He’s a Reaganite pro-life hawkish supply-sider who wants limited government and the lowest possible tax burden. Out of all the running mates available, Mitt Romney chose one of the most explicitly ideological options.

But moderates — and maybe, just maybe, the occasional liberal as well — should appreciate Ryan all the same, because he’s almost single-handedly responsible for saving the Republican Party from some of its own worst impulses.

Failing political parties tend to develop toxic internal cultures, and the post-2008 Republican Party was no exception. Reeling from two consecutive electoral repudiations, Republicans looked poised to spend President Obama’s first term alternating between do-nothingism and delusion. They would demagogue every Democratic proposal, decline to offer any alternative on any issue, and seal themselves inside a fantasy world where tax cuts always pay for themselves and budgets can be balanced by cutting funding for NPR.

J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressRepresentative Paul D. Ryan with members of the House Budget Committee on April 5, 2011.

Some of this came to pass. But from the earliest days of the Obama presidency, Ryan was pushing his fellow Republicans toward a different course. When conservatives praise the Wisconsin congressman for his courage, this willingness to ask more of his own party is a big part of what they have in mind.

Most Republicans didn’t want to offer a detailed alternative to the Democratic health care bill – because details are dangerous, and posturing is easier. But Ryan co-sponsored one anyway, joining Tom Coburn, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, and two other lawmakers in backing what amounted to the only serious Republican response to the Affordable Care Act.

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Most Republicans would have been happy posing as deficit-reducers while arguing for deficit-financed tax cuts. But Ryan, despite his own supply-side sympathies, deliberately drew up a plan for deficit reduction that would work with our current tax code, and doesn’t require any rosy fantasies about how tax cuts will spur unprecedented growth.

Most Republicans would have been happy to hang the White House’s decision to help pay for its health care bill with $700 billion worth of Medicare cuts around President Obama’s neck without proposing any entitlement reforms of their own. But Ryan didn’t just propose a much more sweeping Medicare overhaul, he proceeded to do the hard work of persuading his fellow House Republicans to actually vote for his entitlement-reforming budget – twice.

That budget has plenty of faults, to be sure. But some of its more obvious problems reflect his party’s continuing deficiencies rather than Ryan’s.

The budget repeals the health care bill without replacing it, for instance, not because Ryan doesn’t have a substantial alternative in mind (he continues to support a version of the bill he sponsored with Tom Coburn), but because too many of his fellow congressmen remained unwilling to take the plunge into specificity on that issue.

Similarly, the Ryan budget holds discretionary spending below the realm of plausibility in part because he couldn’t persuade his fellow Republicans to sign on to Social Security reform, which Ryan himself has repeatedly endorsed.

The budget’s proposed tax reform, meanwhile, specifies new lower rates but not the deductions and loopholes that would be closed to pay for them. But Ryan clearly has an idea of which deductions he would cap and which shelters he would eliminate. He just hasn’t persuaded his fellow lawmakers to shoulder the political risks involved in getting specific.

All in all, then, on a series of difficult policy questions, Ryan has either pushed his party in a politically risky but more responsible direction (on Medicare reform) or else endorsed the riskier but more responsible approach himself (on health care and Social Security reform). He has twisted arms when arm-twisting was possible and flown solo when it seemed necessary. To the extent that there is a plausible Republican response to the Obama agenda, he’s the biggest reason it exists.

That agenda is, as I noted at the outset, quite conservative. If you believe that middle class taxes should go up dramatically in order to keep the existing welfare state exactly as it is, as current liberal premises require, then you have every reason to reject Ryan’s proposals. And if you think that his proposals could be amended to require more of the wealthy and well-connected, and invest more in upward mobility for the down-and-out – well, then welcome to the club.

But an honest assessment of Ryan’s record requires acknowledging that he’s made his own party substantially more responsible and rigorous, while also challenging some of the self-deceptions that are endemic on the Democratic side of the aisle. (Of the deep cuts the Ryan budget makes in order to bring the budget into balance, only a small fraction could be offset by repealing George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, the usual liberal answer to deficit reduction.)

Against this backdrop, Romney’s choice of Ryan looks a lot like Ryan’s own policy positioning: It was more politically risky than the alternatives, but it was also more responsible. As a presidential candidate, Romney picked his running mate the way he probably made hiring decisions as a businessman. Out of an array of qualified applicants, he picked the man who’s done the most impressive and important work.

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Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.